his article is a brief introduction to the life and central ideas of thecontroversial Italian thinker Julius Evola (1898-1974), one of the leadingrepresentatives of the European right and of the “Traditionalistmovement”

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in the twentieth century. This movement, together with theTheosophical Society, played a leading role in promoting the study of ancienteastern wisdom, esoteric doctrines, and spirituality. Unlike the TheosophicalSociety, which championed democratic and egalitarian views,

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an optimisticview of progress, and a belief in spiritual evolution, the Traditionalistmovement adopted an elitist and antiegalitarian stance, a pessimistic view ofordinary life and of history, and an uncompromising rejection of the modernworld. The Traditionalist movement began with René Guénon (1886-1951), aFrench philosopher and mathematician who converted to Islam and moved toCairo in 1931, following the death of his first wife. Guénon revived interest inthe concept of Tradition, i.e., the teachings and doctrines of ancientcivilizations and religions, emphasizing its perennial value over and against the“modern world” and its offshoots: humanistic individualism, relativism,materialism, and scientism. Other important Traditionalists of the past centuryhave included Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, and Julius Evola.This article is addressed, first, to persons who claim to be conservative andof rightist persuasion. It is my contention that Evola’s political views can helpthe American right to acquire a greater intellectual relevance and to overcomeits provincialism and narrow horizons. The criticism most frequently leveledby the European “New Right“ against American conservatives is that theideological poverty of the American Right lies in its circling its wagons arounda conservative agenda, in its inability to see the greater scheme of things.

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Bydisclosing to his readers the value and worth of the world of Tradition, Evolahas shown that to be a rightist entails much more than taking a stance on civicand social issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, a strong military, freeenterprise, less taxes, less government, fierce patriotism, and the right to beararms, but rather assessing more crucial matters involving race, ethnicity,eugenics, immigration, and the nature of the nation-state.

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Second, readers with an active interest in spiritual and metaphysicalmatters may find Evola’s thought insightful and his exposition of ancientesoteric techniques very helpful. Moreover, his views, though at times verycritical and astute, have the potential of becoming a catalyst for personaltransformation and spiritual growth.To date, Evola’s work has been subjected to the silent treatment. WhenEvola is not ignored, he is usually vilified by leftist scholars and intellectuals,who demonize him as a bad teacher, racist, rabid anti-Semite, master mind ofright-wing terrorism, fascist guru, or so filthy a racist even to touch him wouldbe repugnant. The writer Martin Lee, whose knowledge of Evola is of the mostsuperficial sort, called him a “Nazi philosopher” and claimed that “Evolahelped compose Italy’s belated racialist laws toward the end of the Fascistrule.”

, did not hesitate to call him a “learnedcharlatan, an eclecticist, not an innovator,” and suggested “there wereelements of pure nonsense also in his later work.”

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Umberto Eco sarcasticallynicknamed Evola “Othelma, the Magician.”The most valuable summaries to date of Evola’s life and work in the Englishlanguage have been written by Thomas Sheehan and Richard Drake.

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Untileither a biography of Evola or his … autobiography becomes available to theEnglish-speaking world, these articles remain the best reference sources for hislife and work. Both scholars are well versed in Italian culture, politics, andlanguage. Although not sympathetic to Evola’s ideas, they were the first tointroduce the Italian thinker’s views to the American public. Unfortunately,their interpretations of Evola’s work are very reductive. Sheehan and Drakesuccumb to the dominant leftist propaganda according to which Evola is a“bad teacher” because he allegedly supplied ideological justification for abloody campaign by right wing terrorists in Italy during the 1980s.

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Regrettably, both authors have underestimated Evola’s

spissitudo spiritualis

asan esotericist and a Traditionalist, and have written about Evola merely as acase study in their fields of competence, i.e., philosophy and history,respectively.

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Despite his many detractors, Evola has enjoyed something of a revival in thepast twenty years. His works have been translated into French, German,

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Spanish, and English, as well as Portuguese, Hungarian, and Russian.Conferences devoted to the study of this or that aspect of Evola’s thought aremushrooming everywhere in Europe.

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Thus, paraphrasing the title of EdwardAlbee’s play, we may want to ask: “Who’s afraid of Julius Evola?” And, mostimportant, why?

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Julius Evola died of heart failure at his Rome apartment on June 11, 1974,at the age of seventy-six. Before he died he asked to be seated at his desk in orderto face the sun’s light streaming through the open window. In accordance withhis will, his body was cremated and the urn containing his ashes was buried ina crevasse on Monte Rosa, in the Italian Alps.Evola’s writing career spanned more than half a century. It is possible todistinguish three periods in his intellectual development. First came an artisticperiod (1916-1922), during which he embraced dadaism and futurism, wrotepoetry, and painted in the abstract style. The reader may recall that dadaismwas an avant-garde movement founded by Tristan Tzara, characterized by ayearning for absolute freedom and by a revolt against all prevalent logical,ethical, and aesthetic canons.Evola turned next to the study of philosophy (1923-1927), developing aningenuous perspective that could be characterized as “transidealistic,” or as asolipsistic development of mainstream idealism. After learning German inorder to be able to read the original texts of the main idealist philosophers(Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel), Evola accepted their chief premise, that being isthe product of thought. Yet he also attempted to overcome the passivity of thesubject toward “reality” typical of idealist philosophy and of its Italianoffshoots, represented by Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce, by outliningthe path leading to the “Absolute Individual,” to the status enjoyed by one whosucceeds in becoming free (ab-solutus) from the conditionings of the empiricalworld. During this period Evola wrote

Saggi sull’idealismo magico

(Essays onmagical idealism),

Teoria dell’individuo assoluto

(Theory of the absoluteindividual), and

Fenomenologia dell’individuo assoluto

(Phenomenology of theabsolute individual), a massive work in which he employs the values offreedom, will, and power to expound his philosophy of action. As the Italianphilosopher Marcello Veneziani wrote in his doctoral dissertation: “Evola’sabsolute I is born out of the ashes of nihilism; with the help of insights derivedfrom magic, theurgy, alchemy and esotericism, it ascends to the highest peaksof knowledge, in the quest for that wisdom that is found on the paths ofinitiatory doctrines.”

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In the third and final phase of his intellectual formation, Evola becameinvolved in the study of esotericism and occultism (1927-1929). During thisperiod he cofounded and directed the so-called Ur group, which publishedmonthly monographs devoted to the presentation of esoteric and initiativedisciplines and teachings. “Ur” derives from the archaic root of the word “fire”;in German it also means “primordial” or “original.” In 1955 these monographswere collected and published in three volumes under the title

Introduzione allamagia quale scienza dell’Io

.

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In the over twenty articles Evola wrote for the Urgroup, under the pseudonym “EA” (Ea in ancient Akkadian mythology was